If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you’ll know that I bang on about Firefox. The web browser not the film, Tim. Firefox 3 has been released and I would thoroughly recommend you upgrade if you’re a Firefox 2 user or just give it a try if you’re not. Why should you bother? Aside from being free, it makes the web a faster, more pleasant and safer experience.
I’m very glad to see that Mr Watkins is back. With Mr Moore rationing his output I was beginning to feel very lonely. Come back my wayward blogging buddies, all is forgiven!
On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.
One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.
I’ve been a very happy resident of Linux land for a long time now and one of the few gripes I’ve had is the stability of my Netgear MA311 wireless network card. With every new release of Ubuntu it’s got less reliable at connecting and when I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 it got really bad, such that often it took four reboots to work and reboots are not something you have to put up with often in Linux.
So, I bit the bullet and bought a new Netgear WG311T, which the nice people at EfficientPC promise will work with Ubuntu. Given that my free time is so precious these days, I find myself much more inclined to buy may way out of problems than ever I was in the past.
With the order placed — which was fulfilled in a very timely and efficient manner — I took a moment to wonder if anyone else out on the intertubes had come across the same problem. A little light googling showed that a few people had issues and it didn’t take long before I came across Jun Sun’s page on how to flash the firmware on the MA311. For the uninitiated, this basically means updating the software that runs on the network card itself. The danger here is that if you get this process wrong you can write off the card.
I had a new card on order, so what was there to loose? I downloaded the appropriate firmware images for the MA311, followed the instructions given on the page and held my breath… Would it work? Would I trash the card?
The network card was still working! Result! I rebooted. It connected first time and continued to work perfectly. I rebooted again and again it connected immediately. Five reboots later and it was still working flawlessly. Years of intermittent behaviour solved in about an hour.
Of course this means I’m now the proud owner of two Netgear wireless network cards but I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade to the faster 802.11g networking from the slower 802.11b networking supported by the MA311. I’ve picked up a DG834GT wireless router/modem from eBay for just over £20 and I can now safely pass the old MA311 on to friends or family knowing it won’t cause them any problems.
For anyone else using Ubuntu who is experiencing these problems, the following steps should resolve the problem:
- sudo apt-get install hostap-utils
- sudo prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 PK010101.HEX SF010802.HEX
I got a little excited about our new computer. You might be wondering why. Well, it replaced our old computer, which was a rather geriatric seven and a half years old! Even I had forgotten that it was that old.
So what does almost four iterations of Moore’s Law give us?
Processor: From a Pentium III 800 MHz to a Core2 Duo 2.2GHz. That’s 2.75 times faster but there are two processors so it could be argued (wrongly) that it’s actually 5.5 times faster. There are much better ways of measuring processor performance but I’m not going to get into that now.
Memory: From 128Mb to 2Gb. That’s 16 times as much and bang on Moore’s prediction! (I did triple the memory to 384Mb on the old machine some years back, it should be noted.)
Disk: From 15Gb to 320Gb. That’s 20 times as much! I find it interesting how disks are growing faster than memory, which is in turn growing faster than processor power.
Graphics: I’m not really clued-up enough to comment on this properly but the on-board memory of the graphics card has risen eightfold from 16Mb to 128Mb. I can, at least, run Google Earth now without the machine grinding to a spectacular halt.
Screen: From a 17″ CRT at 1024×768 to a 22″ flat screen at 1680×1050. That’s 1.3 times as much, linearly speaking. Alternatively, in pixel terms it’s up from 804,864 to 1,764,000, which is 2.2 times as much.
Anything new? A DVD re-writer in place of a CD-ROM drive. Eight USB2 ports, half of which are on the front, instead of two USB1 ports tucked round the back. Headphone and microphone jacks on the front.
Anything missing? A floppy drive, a serial port, a parallel port, a reset button and the sound of a Harrier Jump Jet taking off all the time it’s switched on. Good riddance all. Oh, it didn’t come with Windows, either. I bought this computer from Dell with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed instead and saved some money in the process. Now I have a desktop that looks like it comes out of a Hollywood movie. (Although switching some of these effects on does feel a lot light strapping a neon light to the bottom of your car.)
What this adds up to is a very nice to use machine that boots up in half the time of the old one and does surprising things like rip a CD in four minutes without breaking a sweat. The best bit, though, is the price. I got this phenominal set of upgrades in a machine costing 40% less than the old one. Sometimes, modern life is not rubbish.
Despite being pox-ridden, Ben decided he wanted to be a football player this evening. He got dressed in his shorts and red t-shirt so that everybody would know he was a footballer and then dragged me outside to play football. Well, I say dragged, I actually volunteered because I’m trying to encourage him in his sporting endeavours so that he has some hope of being less of a sporting klutz than his father.
We kicked the ball about a bit and I explained the concept of dribbling the ball to Ben. Eventually Ben settled on playing goalie, which he really enjoyed.
After ten or fifteen minutes Ben got distracted by the moon, then asked me, “Is that Mars?” and pointed a patch of rapidly darkening blue sky. “Errr, I don’t know, perhaps. It’s certainly the right place.”
Ben and I have been making tentative steps into the world of astronomy. This is something I used to love and I’d spend cold evenings out the back of my parent’s house learning the constellations when I was a teenager.
A couple of months back Ben expressed an interest in the stars one night when we were getting out of the car and he happened to look up. Keen to foster his interest in something I love, we dug out an astronomy book that was a dust-gathering Christmas present from a few years ago. We’ve been looking at it together on and off since then.
Ben is very interested in the constellations and can now identify his first, Casseopia, or “the lady in the sky” as he calls it. The advantage of this constellation is that it’s high in the sky — currently you just look straight up in the UK — it’s bright, and it’s easy to spot: five stars in a W shape. I’m attempting to show him The Plough but it’s too close to the horizon currently and the atrocious light pollution doesn’t help either.
About ten minutes after Ben had asked about Mars, I glanced up again and there, pretty much the only thing in the sky besides the moon, was the red twinkling dot of Mars. Damn kids with their working eyes.
One thing I discovered while starting to pick up on the astronomy again is Stellarium. It’s simply… well, stellar! If you have evening a passing interesting in the stars you should check out this amazing, free piece of software.
I’ve been working heavily on a project with Mark for the last couple of weeks, hence the distinct lack of posts here. However, a spam email I received triggered a thought.
I don’t get much spam and thanks to Thunderbird’s junk filtering I barely have to spend any time even thinking about it. Recently, though, I’ve been paying it more attention because I realised that I can do my part in making the web a safer place: In Firefox you can report scam sites, or “web forgeries” as they call them. This information is then passed on to all other Firefox users and they are warned if they ever visit that scam site. Cool, huh? So that’s what I’m doing now, to try and give a little bit back. Want to help?
Want to know what makes me tick? Blog posts like this and this. I love this kind of performance monitoring and optimisation work. Sometimes I wish this was what my job was all about.
The upshot of these particular posts? I think Firefox 3 is going to be very cool to play with.
When I first started this blog I thought I would be writing a lot of technical posts about programming and computing in general but that just hasn’t happened. I think that’s mainly due to the big divide I create between work and home. When I’m home I try (fairly successfully) to forget all about work. I don’t do much programming outside of work these days so when it comes to blogging all the programming thoughts are at the back of my mind. I do engage in computing of the family-tech-support variety, so finally here’s a post dedicated to the subject.
First the fluffy stuff. Lots of people are still stuck with using Windows XP and the default Luna theme looks like it was purchased from an Early Learning Centre. Try finding and installing the Energy Blue theme instead. It’s a lot more restful and manages to calm down the Pimp My Word Doc stylings of Office 2003 to the point where I don’t want to throw up.
My in-laws have just brought a new Lenovo 3000 C200 laptop, which features Windows Vista. Unfortunately it came with so much crap loaded that it ran like a total dog. Rather than try to tame Vista with a meagre half gig of ram or run for cover by installing XP, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.
Everything worked perfectly out of the box apart from the wireless and sound; I never have had much luck with other people’s hardware and Linux. Anyway, a few minutes googling later I came across the solution: For wireless follow these instructions and for sound follow these instructions. Don’t worry if it looks a bit complicated, just enter the commands listed and in 10 minutes everything will be working. This means you can have an operational laptop in around an hour, plus the performance doesn’t suck. Result!
Hopefully future versions of Ubuntu will have these issues resolved and the install or upgrade will be made even easier. If you have a laptop and need help with Ubuntu then I can thoroughly recommend looking for your model on the Laptop Testing Team’s page.
If you’d like to try Ubuntu then one very safe option is Wubi. This is a piece of very clever software that allows you to install a whole other operating system, namely Ubuntu, onto your Windows hard drive without doing anything remotely dangerous or scary sounding like “repartitioning”. When you’re done you can just uninstall like any other Windows application. Amazing!
Ever feel you’re losing the battle against entropy and chaos? Well, it’s certainly feeling that way around here at the moment. My boss is on leave at work, right when an important client is making a tricky hardware transition, leaving me to do the tidying up. Then I get roped into a sales meeting in the US, so I’m going to be away from home for two days, which will no doubt mess up my body clock nicely.
And at home? Well, the hard drive finally broke so I had to rebuild the PC, which was actually quite painless — thanks Ubuntu! Then the kids managed to break our bed this week by jumping on it too enthusiastically, meaning the mattress is on the floor until the replacement arrives next Tuesday, when, of course, I’m in the US and unable to put it together for Louise.
So, I may be losing the war at the moment but there’s one battle I can win: With some help from the Google Reader Widget for WordPress I’ve added the contents of my news feed to the right-hand side of the blog. Sweet. Hope you find the links interesting.
Also making an attempt for the most categories for a single post here.
So, to round off my triptych of pointers to cool websites this month I’m going to suggest you check out last.fm. It’s an internet based radio station that you can listen to through your web browser or through dedicated software. You start by entering the name of an artist you like and then it plays tracks by similar artists.
The real coolness starts when you create an account — everything you listen to is recorded in your profile. You can skip over or even permanently ban tracks you don’t like. In this way the system learns what you like. Over time it starts coming up with recommendations for you and finds other “neighbour” users on the site who share your tastes. Then you can tune in and listen to what they’re listening to. What a great way to discover new music!
I’m really only scratching the surface here, too. You can download plug-ins for your “normal” music player (e.g. iTunes, WinAmp, Songbird or even your iPod) so that what you listen to “normally” is recorded in your last.fm profile. You can create groups. You can see when your favourite artists are playing nearby. You can add your recently played tracks to your blog. You can make recommendations to your friends. You can clear out your profile and “start again”. You can even listen to my very own radio station.